Conversation With...

This weekend I will….roast some coffee, play video games, watch movies with my partner and possibly leave Melbourne for the first time in many months or is it years?

I’d originally planned to work…as an astronaut of course! Like all young kids I thought it would be something exciting.

The qualities I most value in my colleagues are….their resilience and capacity to utilise lived and living experience of a health system and society that continues to discriminate against us based on an outdated moralism. People who use and inject drugs are considered the most stigmatised population by the W.H.O. and one day it will be seen as inhumane as witch trials, imprisoning LGBTQI+ people and all the other awful things humans do to those we are afraid of.

The career highlight I am most proud of is...not something I have done personally but as a movement people who use drugs have demanded an end to this stigma and discrimination and although it continues, it is now more understood as being unacceptable and counter-productive.

My goal for next year is…to ensure that our organisation and community is as healthy and happy as possible as we (hopefully) transition out of a pandemic mindset

What I’d love to tackle next…is unfortunately not realistic, but it would be fantastic if there was a real chance to effect reform of Victoria’s drug laws. By almost any measure you want to use, prohibition has failed.

About Sione

Sione Crawford has worked in the NSW, ACT and Victorian organisations of people who use drugs since 2004 in a number of roles including peer education, community development, policy and advocacy and management. He is now the CEO of Harm Reduction Victoria.

Sione is committed to harm reduction, his first-hand experience of harm reduction in action has kept him safe on more than a few occasions and he is a champion for striving to ensure that people who use and inject drugs are treated with dignity and respect.

Sione is particularly interested in working to effect structural change at the policy level, while involving those with current lived experience. He is also interested in how the knowledge and our understanding of injecting drug use and drug treatment is constructed in society.